From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Nov 17 2002 - 01:43:15 GMT
Hi again John,
Just a quick reply now.
You quoted Pinker:
> "Every emotion and thought gives off physical signals
> and the new technologies for detecting them are so
> accurate that they can literally read a persons mind
> and tell a neuroscientist whether the person is
> imagining a place or a face."
> (Ibid pg42)
I can tell by looking in your eyes and watching your facial expressions
whether you're sad or amused, for instance. But I can't literally 'see'
or 'feel' your emotions directly. Same goes for the neuroscientist
looking at the brain. A thought-experiment from Chalmers: A cognitive
neuroscientist of the future (or today if you will) who is colorblind
from birth can know everything about colorperception on the brain-level.
But she'll never know what 'blue' 'looks like'. Something's missing in
the neuroscientific picture.
That science can relate brain-events ever more accurately with cognitive
events is true, but a one-to-one mapping has yet to be found. Untill
that day comes, it remains a leap of faith to state that neural events
fully encapsulate and cause consciousness.
Remember that at the turn of the second-last century, physicists thought
they had it all figured out how the world works? Only the
Michelson-Morley (spelling?) experiment and the black-body radiation
were little gaps in knowledge. And only a few decades later we had the
new physics with Einstein and quantum mechanics.
Similarly, in journals such as brain and behavioral sciences and
physical review letters there are reported 'anomalous' findings
concerning the mind-brain or mind-matter relation. (I can give you some
references if you want to). But equally, it is a leap of faith to think
this will eventually lead to a neuroscientific (and philosophical)
revolution similar to the one we saw in the beginning of the twentieth
century, or that the gradual evolution of the neurosciences will fully
tackle the brain-mind after all...
> But, being one who prefers
> science to philosophy I would suggest Pinker as a
> start.
I once saw an interview with him on the BBC "Hardtalk", and was
impressed. I read ABOUT him in a textbook on cogn. neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience: the biology of the mind, Gazzaniga, Ivry and
Mangun) Ah, allright then, I'll look it up: In How the Mind works, he
states three issues in the problem of consciousness: 1) Sentience 2)
access to information 3) self-knowledge. In a paragraph later, it says:
"Right from the start we can say that science has little to say about
sentience. We are clueless how the brain creates sentience." I can agree
with that! Except for the assumption that 'brain creates sentience'. I
rather believe it's the other way around. (I tried to elaborate on this
in previous posts, of around februar or so).
By the way, I appreciate your critical posts. I do tend to have my own
thoughts first, and am not always giving other's viewpoints a fair
chance. True enough...
Eh, not a quick reply after all. Thanks for your time.
Greetings, Patrick.
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Nov 17 2002 - 01:44:46 GMT